All right, I’ve forked off the discussion about flagging. I think that upgrading the internal mechanics of moderation is probably something for the mods to discuss, if it is determined that “moar feedback” is the correct way to fix the flagging issue. The rest of us just don’t have familiarity with the duties, workload, or current interface that the mods have to use, that we would need in order to suggest improvements.
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Aha, @nimelennar you had text butting up against the [details] tag at the top. That won’t work. I added a return so there was space between and now it is fine. Sorry, I was going to answer with that, went to check it, and missed the original thing I was going to answer with, which turned out to be the cause…
This is now complete. Once muted, someone can’t PM you. Staff are immune to this, of course.
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Huh. I thought that I’d checked that.
Odd that it worked in the preview panel.
Here’s another example, and one that make me uniquely sad:
Is there a better place to drop Onebox failures?
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That’s seven characters. 
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“Chat” has been defined as > 10,000 posts.
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N.o.p.e.!
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Block User Feature
Having been a part of the previous “block user” discussions, and familiar with the issues such systems can cause, like the conversation chain, context, invisible discussions.
i’ve been giving this some thought…
What if instead of Block User, there was a “Hush” feature where when you flag a user as “hushed” you can still see if they comment or are quoted but their content is collapsed and greyed out, but can be expanded if one chooses, similar to flagged posts.
This allows for users to read and get context when needed, and be aware of comments and quotes, without having it in their face.
Also would block direct PMs between those users.
Does that make sense? Just a thought, better then dissapearing them altogether, but also keeping them out of your face.
Comment Flow Master View
I’d love a view where you can see all comments in one spot as they come in, with links to their respective threads, so you can park on that page and see all new conversations as they come in, and like them or pop over to the thread to reply or comment. Kinda a hybrid of the main page and thread view for us bbs lurkers.
I think that Discourse is one of the best forums style software for community building.
#Congratulations on hitting the 4yr mark.
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Beyond all @nimelennar 's excellent comments on this, when a number of experienced users are pointing out the same thing, there might well be a real issue.
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Yes! This is exactly it!
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Well, it’d still be mute, just an enhanced and time/topic/category-boxed mute, but I definitely envisioned something like what you’re describing.
We already collapse deleted posts (only staff can see these, though) so the code more or less exists. You can get a sense of it by going to the first post on any topic with >= 50 posts and pressing the “summarize topic” button. Same basic behavior. See how posts get collapsed?
Like that.
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Having been a moderator of a large forum myself I’ll say it’s not complex, it just requires a greater commitment to the users.
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A few sentences per violation is good for a community that self polices well, but that is a recipe for volunteer moderator burnout in the medium large forum I work with. If they want to take the time to send me a message to clarify what happen I will be happy to answer, but otherwise it is pretty time consuming. Having a function that gives you some check boxes to just pick which of the common garden variety rules violations when you mod delete can go a long way to make this easier.
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Besides that (from my experience modding/adminning) generally a user outright offended that they’ve been flagged doesn’t use that information for self-betterment, just to continue ruleslawyering and yelling about “the other gal/guy”, whatever true lawbreaker in this interaction.
Edit: I don’t think it’s always a terrible idea, but it’s not going to solve personal problems with “moderator bias” in a different way than sending a PM to the moderator in question.
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Doubly so when the person being given a time out is a regular member who is recognizable to other regular users.
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